


Patres Est Mortui

by Wayward_WLW (Parker_Haven_Wuornos)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: A heartwarming story about patricide, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, But fairly close all things considered, But they don't die the canonical way, Canonical Character Death, Castiel is Jack Kline's Parent, Dean Winchester is Jack Kline's Parent, Gen, Not Canon Compliant, Sam Winchester Kills John Winchester, Sam Winchester is Jack Kline's Parent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-24 01:00:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30064230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Parker_Haven_Wuornos/pseuds/Wayward_WLW
Summary: Sam Winchester kills his father.It’s an ugly, complicated thing, but he does it.And honestly, he doesn’t even hesitate that much.The demon is wearing his father, and the demon is killing Dean; it’s a choice between killing his father and letting the man who raised him die.He pulls the trigger. All he feels is relief.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Jack Kline & Sam Winchester
Comments: 6
Kudos: 16





	Patres Est Mortui

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I haven't written anything from Sam's pov and I thought I'd give it a try. I would really appreciate feedback on how I did!  
> *Pretentious latin title because I really could not think of anything else to call it.

Sam Winchester kills his father. 

It’s an ugly, complicated thing, but he does it. 

And honestly, he doesn’t even hesitate that much. 

The demon is wearing his father, and the demon is killing Dean; it’s a choice between killing his father and letting the man who raised him die. 

So Sam pulls the trigger, and apparently the times he’d skipped his father’s mandatory after school target practice didn’t matter that much, because his aim is perfect. 

The demon glows and sparks under his father’s skin, and when that fades, what’s left is the sluggishly bleeding corpse of John Winchester. 

All Sam feels is relief. 

Dean stares at him, and Sam mentally runs through all the times he’s seen him terrified, and thinks they all pale in comparison to the way he looks as he glances between the body and Sam and the gun in his hands. 

Dean’s silence screams at him as they drive away from the scene. The body is wrapped in a sheet in the backseat. They’d had to debate about putting him there or in the trunk. Either way, his legs had to be folded awkwardly to fit, and it’s undignified and weird. 

Sam watches Dean’s eyes flick to the rearview mirror over and over, like he’s worried that the corpse will jump to life if he looks away from it for too long. 

“Dean—” 

Dean looks away to stare out the window, so Sam decides not to say anything until later. Whatever this conversation will be, it’ll probably be easier when their father’s body isn’t decaying behind them. 

They don’t talk, and Sam drives back to Bobby’s. He doesn’t mention it to Dean, and Dean doesn’t complain that he didn’t ask before choosing the destination. Bobby’s is a default place, and things will be easier when they’re there. 

By the time they get there, Dean still hasn’t said anything, hasn’t even turned on the radio. His face is stony and blank, pale underneath the blood. 

Sam remembers this from when they were kids, how sometimes when something went wrong—a fight with their father, a bad hunt—Dean would just go silent, sometimes for days at a time. He wonders vaguely if Dean did this when Sam first went away, but knows he’ll never know.

The only person who would have told him is dead.

Strangely, Sam isn’t all that surprised that he’s the one who did it. Between himself and Dean, he’s the obvious choice, but it also feels strangely inevitable. Some kind of reverse Abraham and Isaac, except Sam went through with the murder.

He wonders if Dean will ever forgive him.

The sun is high by the time they pull into the salvage yard. Bobby jogs out to the car, shotgun in one hand and a bottle of what’s probably holy water in the other. He slows and stops when Dean hauls himself, bleeding and more broken than he’ll ever admit to, out of the car.

Sam runs around the car to help him into the house, but Dean pulls away so hard he falls into the dust.

Bobby helps him up, glances at Sam, and then just leads Dean inside.

Sam had stopped asking how Bobby knew things when he was a kid; eventually he had started assuming Bobby knew everything. The fact that Bobby could—and would—sit and answer Sam’s hundreds of rapid-fire questions had been the most amazing thing Sam’s ten-year-old brain could imagine. The fact that he’s some kind of field medic doesn’t come as a shock; Sam accepts it with the same pleased awe he’d accepted the answers to his science questions back in the day.

After about an hour, Dean is asleep, his wounds stitched, his head iced.

“We’ll check on him in half an hour,” Bobby says. “Now, are you going to tell me what the hell happened?”

Sam wordlessly leads him back to the car and opens the back door.

“Is that John?”

Sam nods.

Bobby whistles through his teeth and pulls his hat off, twisting it in his hands. “How’d, uh, how’d it happen?”

“I shot him with the colt.”

Bobby gives him a long, hard to read stare. “Was he possessed?”

Finally, Sam’s attention snaps away from the body. “What? Yes! He was killing Dean.”

Bobby nods slowly and puts a hand on Sam’s shoulder. “You did the right thing.”

Sam shifts a little closer to the contact, just slightly, not even really meaning to, and Bobby jerks him into a rough hug.

He hadn’t realized how much he needs it. It cracks something inside him, and he hugs Bobby back, wishing for the first time that he was smaller, that he could hide himself behind Bobby and stay there.

But he can’t, so he straightens up, smiles tightly at Bobby, and goes to check on Dean.

When he comes back down ten minutes later, Bobby is assembling a pyre.

“We can’t… gotta wait for Dean.”

“We will.” Bobby tosses another log onto the pile and then nods. “That’ll do it. Come inside, we’ll see if we can find you some food.”

He knows what Bobby is doing, but he doesn’t mention it. Some secret part of him wants to be parented, just a little, just until Dean wakes up.

When that happens, Bobby’s attention will shift, and Sam won’t mind. After all, he’s proven that he doesn’t need a father.

Dean wakes up the next day, and Bobby makes him breakfast. Sam tries to sit with him while he eats, but he can’t bare the silence, can’t bear that his brother won’t even look in his direction, much less in his eyes.

He goes outside and wanders around the yard, wishing he were more like Dean, that he knew how to fix things. He wants to be up to his elbows in something grimy, either as a punishment or distraction; he’s not sure. Instead, he accidentally stumbles across the pyre Bobby had built the day before, now with the body lain neatly across it.

All it needs is a match.

Sam has a lighter in his pocket.

Dean is already furious at him; what’s one more thing, just to have everything over with?

But Sam can’t bring himself to do it. His closure—if such a thing exists—is as solid as it can be. Hell, he’s pretty sure he’d done all the grieving he was ever going to do four years ago. This just seems redundant.

He turns his back on the pyre and heads back to the house.

He gets his laptop from the car and starts to dig, cycling through his usual channels to find weird or mysterious deaths, then widens the search out to crimes when nothing pings his radar as being particularly monstrous.

Nothing comes up.

All that does is make him go deeper, searching for cold cases, urban legends, _anything._ When Dean makes it downstairs, he’ll want a case, and Sam will be ready with one.

If they’re on a case, Dean will have to talk to him, even if they don’t talk about what happened. Eventually, things will come around and they’ll have to talk about what Sam had done, and maybe Dean will punch him, or maybe he’ll cry, or maybe just yell until he’s hoarse, but after that, it’ll be over.

He’ll be forgiven.

He spends hours looking for cases, and doesn’t find much of anything, certainly nothing that would force Dean out.

 _C’mon, God,_ Sam prays. _Give me this one. Give me something. Dean… Dean needs this. Maybe I need this. Just, give us something to do._

The heavens, as usual, remain silent, and Sam doesn’t feel particularly called towards anything, so he shuts the laptop.

He figures he should pray for forgiveness. He’d shot his father last night, but maybe killing the demon makes it okay. Maybe in God’s eyes, that evens him out. He also, for once, doesn’t feel like this is a sin he needs washed clean from.

It still feels more like saving his brother than killing his father.

That night, Dean hobbles downstairs and outside, mostly supported on Bobby’s arm. They stand around the pyre and Dean flips his zippo and tosses it.

It falls into the dirt and the flame goes out.

They reach for it at the same time and Dean jerks away, leaving the lighter where it is.

Bobby lights a match and tosses it, and the fire builds slowly, until it wraps around the body; it burns to look directly at it.

They walk away before the smell gets too bad. 

It takes three days before Dean speaks to him again.

It happens during a case, and Sam decides that the evil murder clown—something Dean had assured him didn’t exist when they were kids—is worth it, if it means they’re talking again.

Dean only talks about the case, and he explodes when Sam gently probes him about what happened. So Sam leaves it alone; he lets Dean go at his pace.

They’re driving home, the monster is dead, the sky is dark. Sam is halfway to dozing off when Dean says, “Why?”

Sam shakes the sleep out of his brain, forces himself to think before he answers. The answer is still the same after he’s thought. “He was killing you.”

“Dad—”

“Wasn’t dad.”

“We could have saved him.”

“Maybe,” Sam acknowledges. He hadn’t thought about it.

“You shouldn’t have…”

“Dean, it was him or you,” Sam says slowly, making sure his brother hears him.

The silence stretches as long as the highway in front of them. Sam sees another milage sign flick by before he realizes what Dean is thinking.

“You think it should have been you.”

Dean shrugs, a rough, jerky movement, like he’s being pulled by a bad puppeteer.

“Dean…”

“Killing the demon was supposed to come before everything,” Dean says, parroting words they’d heard from their father too damn many times. “But—”

Sam frowns. “I wasn’t thinking about killing the demon,” He admits. “I was thinking about saving you.”

And now his father is dead.

Sam thinks it’s probably what their father would have wanted. The sort of thing he would have seen as a good death.

Sam doesn’t care one way or the other, but it probably matters to Dean.

“If it was me…” Sam asks carefully, knowing he’s walking onto thin ice.

As they drive under a streetlight, Sam catches a glimpse of the absolute agony of indecision on Dean’s face. His voice is very quiet, almost inaudible over the engine, when he replies. “I’da done the same thing.”

Sam already knew this, but he wonders if Dean had.

They drive. A few more milage markers go by.

“Sammy?”

Sam glances at Dean out of the corner of his eye.

“I forgive you.”

They never talk about it again.

* * *

Sam Winchester is a father. 

Like all good things in his life, his son is not entirely his; yet another thing he shares with Dean, and—lately—with Cas, but still.

Sam Winchester has a son.

Jack is, objectively speaking, perfect. He’s smart, funny, caring, curious, but he’s afraid that he might be evil.

Sam knows what that’s like. He remembers the first time he’d flipped through his father’s journal, only to find a passage where his father mused that maybe Sam wasn’t his son at all, that maybe his real father was a demon.

He remembers feeling unclean, feeling freakish and wrong for so much of his life that he can’t remember a time when that stain wasn’t on him.

He never talked to Dean about it, not really. Dean couldn’t understand. But he talked to Jack about it.

“What do you do?” Jack had asked once. “What do you do to make it better?”

Sam hadn’t had an answer for him, and thankfully Dean had walked in, so he hadn’t needed one.

Now they’re up against Lucifer.

Lucifer is Jack’s father, and Lucifer is someone Sam wants to see dead. It’s a little hard to justify sometimes, when he sees Jack’s curiosity about his birth father. Sam gets it. He thinks he’d be curious too, if he’d never met his father.

He also thinks he’d have been disappointed when it finally happened.

He wants to save Jack from that.

In the end, it doesn’t work out.

Jack meets Lucifer, and Sam watches it happen with acid churning in his stomach and a phantom pain where his throat had been torn out and repaired.

Lucifer opens his arms, offering a hug that Jack accepts with a reluctance so visible it has Sam mentally running his odds for killing Lucifer while his back is turned.

Sam’s odds, by his own calculation, are zero, so he’s forced to endure it as Lucifer puts a paternal hand on Jack’s back and leads him towards the outskirts of the camp where they can talk.

He misses his powers for the first time in a long time, thinks that if there was even the faintest trace of demon blood left in his system, he’d have thrown Lucifer halfway across the planet with rage alone. Unfortunately, there isn’t, so he just watches, glaring, hoping Lucifer can feel it.

 _Get away from my son!_ He wants to shout, but he’s not sure how Jack would react to that. Like most things in hunting and being a Winchester, the fact that he’s one of Jack’s dads is unspoken. The only one of them Sam has heard Jack refer to as his father is Cas, and Sam would be lying if he said that didn’t make him a little envious.

But at least he hasn’t said that about Lucifer.

Bile climbs up the back of his throat as images flash through his mind. Jack hanging off Lucifer’s words, drinking in the manipulation until he’s a good little soldier. Jack, eyes narrowed in suspicion where they had once been wide and guileless. Jack, red-eyed and powerful, no longer smiling.

Cas moves forward, standing next to Sam and staring at the space between two trees where Jack and Lucifer had disappeared.

“Is there a way to kill him?” Sam asks, even though he knows the answer.

“No.” Cas sounds as regretful as Sam feels.

Sam hesitates, then says, “Could Jack do it?”

Cas gives him a startled look, but his face quickly goes back to his usual, vaguely concerned expression. His voice is carefully neutral when he says, “Possibly.”

The question— _would he?_ —hangs between them, carefully ignored.

Sam knows that even the nicest kid, if pushed, can kill his father.

He hopes Jack isn’t pushed; hopes they don’t have to find out what would make him do what Sam had done more than ten years ago. Sam thinks he can guess, thinks that Jack probably inherited the same trigger that had gotten Sam to that point.

If Lucifer hurts his family, Jack could do it.

Sam wonders if Cas is thinking the same thing, but he doesn’t ask. Instead, he walks away.

At first, he gravitates towards Bobby, but hearing him talk is too strange. He’s Bobby, but he isn’t. This isn’t the Bobby who’d met his eyes and told him he’d done the right thing by killing his father. This is just some guy who looks like Bobby. Just a stranger with a familiar face.

His mom is pacing the outskirts of the clearing, her eyes vigilant, shotgun clutched in her hands. Sam joins her, fulfilling the urge to be near family without needing to get between Dean and Cas, who are sitting together, their heads bent close, muttering about something.

“Can I join you?” He asks her.

She eyes him at first, her expression suspicious. “I can patrol on my own,” She says, mostly gently, but with the edge of steel he’d become used to.

“Can I join you anyway?” He asks.

She softens. “Of course.”

She keeps her eyes on the trees ahead of them, which is easier.

He shifts around, not sure what to say now that he’s here. There are a thousand things he wants to ask her, most of them unrelated.

The question that comes out of his mouth is, “Were you mad? When you found out about Dad?”

An expression flickers over her face, one he can’t name, and it’s gone before he can really interpret it.

She breathes, and watches the woods quietly for a long time before answering. “I was more angry that he raised you as hunters.”

Given that she had been furious about that, it isn’t saying much.

She sighs heavily. “I wondered if there was another way.”

Sam shrugs, and cautiously admits, “I didn’t look for one.”

The trees around them rustle quietly. Back in the camp, Sam can hear people moving around, calling orders and instructions, but it feels very far from where they are.

“The man you killed,” Mary finally says, “Wasn’t my John. If I had met that man, I wouldn’t have recognized him.”

More weighted silence, then, finally, “You killed a stranger.”

Sam nods. If that’s how she needs to justify it, he won’t argue with her, even if he knows differently.

He’d killed his father, and over a decade later, he still doesn’t feel guilty about it.

Jack returns to camp about an hour later. He looks tired. He looks older, too.

Cas and Dean are already approaching him. Sam hangs back, studying his face, watching the way his body orients around Lucifer, the subtle way his shoulders shift so that he’s not too close.

A rush of relief sweeps Sam. Jack doesn’t trust Lucifer. There’s still a chance.

Cas pulls Jack away, glaring over his shoulder while Lucifer just smiles carelessly.

Sam’s hands curl into fists. The bastard thinks he’s won, thinks he has Jack on his side, thinks all is forgiven.

He forces his thoughts very directly at Lucifer, and pins him with a glare. _Stay away from my son._

Lucifer looks up, a little startled, but he meets Sam’s eyes and his grin only becomes more smug.

Dean follows Cas and Jack, and Lucifer begins to walk into the camp, brushing past Sam. At the last moment, he leans in to whisper, “He might not be my son, Sammy, but I’m damn sure he’s not yours.”

Sam sees red, a rage the likes of which he hasn’t felt in years courses through him so sure and strong it shocks him, like diving into icy water.

He reaches for Lucifer’s throat, curling his hands around it, pleased that his fingers wrap all the way around it.

Lucifer’s laugh is choked off and gargling; Sam isn’t even hurting him.

It only makes him angrier, only makes him tighten his grip.

He shakes Lucifer, and the motion forces Sam’s eyes up. Over Lucifer’s shoulder, Sam can see Jack, wide-eyed and alarmed, watching them.

Sam sees it from Jack’s perspective, sees himself, face twisted in fury, uselessly throttling Lucifer for what probably looks like no reason.

He lets go, jerks away, nearly falls over in his rush to leave.

Sam runs, runs like he’s still a little kid being chased by bullies, runs like there’s any chance he’ll be able to get away from this problem. Runs until his lungs are burning and he reaches a river, and can’t go any further.

He leans over the water, splashing it on his face, desperately trying to wash himself clean of that feeling.

It doesn’t work, but he walks back to camp anyway.

Dean rushes over when he sees him, his pace just shy of a jog, as if he’s trying to hide his concern.

“You okay?” He asks.

“Yeah.”

As usual, Dean clearly doesn’t believe him, but doesn’t push it.

“Kid’s worried,” Is all he says.

Sam nods. “I’ll talk to him.”

Dean gives him one last, lingering look, and then he turns away.

It takes him several minutes to find Jack, but when he does, he laughs.

Jack is perched on a tree branch about fifteen feet above the ground, staring stonily ahead.

“I used to do this too,” He calls up. “When I ran away, I’d hide in trees.”

“I’m not hiding,” Jack says, sounding closer to the age he is than the age he looks.

“Can I join you?” Sam asks.

Jack doesn’t say no, so Sam starts to climb, something that’s much harder than he remembers it being.

He manages to reach Jack, and only smacks his head against branches a couple of times, which he counts as a win.

By the time he makes it up, Jack is smiling a little.

“What,” Sam asks, “You climbed up here better?”

Jack tilts his head. “I flew.”

“Of course you did.” Sam smiles.

“You want to talk to me about Lucifer,” Jack says after a while.

“Do you want to talk about Lucifer?” Sam throws back at him, because even though Jack is right, he sounds so sullen that Sam can’t bring himself to admit it.

“No.”

Sam shrugs. They lapse into silence for a while, but Sam eventually breaks it. “Did Dean ever tell you how our dad died?”

Jack shakes his head.

“I killed him,” Sam admits.

Jack turns all the way to look at him, his head tilted in confusion, the gesture so distinctly Cas that it’s almost alarming. Sam wonders if Jack has any of his mannerisms too; he knows he’s seen him imitate Dean, and that maybe he just can’t spot his own quirks and ticks when they appear.

He hopes that’s what it is, hopes that there’s something of him in their strange, shared son.

“What happened?” Jack prompts. “Was he… evil?”

“Sometimes,” Sam says, and then looks up, searching for Dean and bracing himself to hear the usual litany of excuses he makes for their father.

But Dean is back at the camp, and he and Jack are alone in this tree, so Sam can say what he wants.

“He was possessed when I killed him. The demon in him was killing Dean.”

In a different kind of story, it would have been symbolic; their father’s inner demons killing his brother, slowly breaking him down.

Hell, that was true in this story, but Sam is being literal right now, even if he wishes he weren’t.

“I had to save Dean,” Sam explains.

“It was the only way,” Jack finishes for him; he’s already heard the words from each of them enough times.

The family motto.

“You want to know something I never told anyone before?” Sam asks.

Jack nods, curious and eager and so earnest.

“I didn’t feel bad about it.”

Jack’s face folds into a frown, and Sam thinks maybe it’s an expression he’s made before, maybe this is the thing Jack got from him. “You didn’t?”

“No.” Sam takes a deep breath. “My father… he wasn’t… good.”

“Like my father,” Jack says, resigned, like he’d always known this was going to come back to Lucifer.

“No, not like him,” Sam says, and he’s pleased when Jack looks at him again. He smiles ruefully. “There are lots of ways to be a bad father.”

Jack keeps watching him with wide, earnest eyes.

“I didn’t like him, so when I killed him, it just felt… the same.”

“Did you love him?” Jack asks, in the same intellectually curious voice he uses to ask Sam about shapeshifters and whether sea monsters are real and how to kill them if so.

“Sometimes,” Sam says, but what he means is sort of. He sort of loved his father, the way people love the things they’re expected to love. Detached, more enamored with the idea than with the person.

“Do you love Lucifer?” Sam asks, more curious than anything.

Jack tilts his head and thinks about it for a while. “No. I don’t know him.”

“No,” Sam says, “You don’t.”

“Why don’t you like him?” Jack asks. “You all keep saying he’s a bad guy, but you haven’t told me what he did.”

It’s a can of worms Sam would desperately like to keep closed and buried, far away from Jack, who’s so _good_ that Sam worries telling him all this will take something from him, change him the way that learning about monsters had changed Sam when he was a kid.

But they’re talking about Jack’s birth father. He has a right to know.

So Sam takes a very deep breath, and then tells him. He starts with the easy stuff, the biblical things that are distant and impersonal. He keeps his tone the same when he talks about the real stuff, about Lucifer trying to get him to say yes, about Ellen and Jo dying when they’d tried to kill him the first time, about finally saying yes.

About the cage.

That part is the worst. Watching Jack make himself smaller and smaller, his eyes fixed on the ground far below them as Sam, in the least detail possible, explains what happened to him when he was in the cage.

It’s a little easier after that. He tells Jack about Lucifer using Cas as a vessel. He doesn’t say much about it, because it’s not his story to tell, but he wants Jack to know, and clearly Cas hasn’t volunteered the information.

By the end, Sam feels exhausted, more tired than his run had made him, but also more clean than the river had made him.

He’s exhausted, wrung out, but better.

Jack is staring at the tree branch he’s sitting on, scratching little patterns into it with a twig. The symbols look vaguely Enochian, but Sam doesn’t try to translate. His forehead is folded into a look of consternation that Sam is sure he’s seen in the mirror.

“I’m sorry,” Sam says, really meaning it. “I wish… I wish your father was better.”

Jack looks at him, stares right into his eyes and maybe his soul. “I wish yours was too.”

A brittle part inside of him cracks and shatters, but Sam makes sure it doesn’t show on his face. “Thanks, Jack.”

“Can I be alone for a few minutes?” Jack asks.

Sam nods and begins to climb down. About halfway there, he stops and looks up at Jack. “Kid… family doesn’t end with blood. You’re still… you’re _ours_ , no matter what he is.”

Jack’s mouth quirks up in a hesitant half-smile. “Thanks, Sam.”

Back at the camp, Sam joins Cas and Dean, pretending he doesn’t notice the way they shift apart. He’s not sure what’s going on there, and he knows better than to ask. Instead he fills them in on what he’d said to Jack.

Cas looks sad, old and tired, but he nods, resolute.

Dean’s jaw tenses, a muscle there ticking under the skin. He looks like he wants to say something, but Sam keeps his gaze steady, sure, and eventually Dean backs down and gives a nod of his own.

They talk battle strategies and ways to help the people here, skirting around the Lucifer issue for as long as they can.

The sun is starting to set when Jack comes back to the clearing. He tries to brush past Lucifer, but he grabs him by the arm, his face and voice falsely cheery. “Hey, son!”

Jack glares back. “I’m not your son.” His eyes flash golden and he holds Lucifer’s gaze.

Sam’s heart is in his throat. If Lucifer does something to Jack, there’s not a damn thing any of them can do to stop him. It could be over in a blink, and then what?

Jack has only been part of their life for a handful of months, but Sam doesn’t want to imagine going back to the way things were before him. Even after weeks with him missing, they hadn’t removed the signs of his presence in the bunker, and Sam can’t imagine it without them.

Lucifer stares back, his eyes red and sinister, but Jack doesn’t even flinch. He stares, his chin jutted out, face defiant.

Sam almost smiles. He looks like Dean, back when he was a teenager, ready to mouth off to any cop that looked at him wrong.

He has no idea how long the stare down goes on, but after too many tense breaths, the strangest thing happens.

Lucifer blinks first.

He lets go of Jack, and steps away.

And Jack walks past him to stand between Sam and Cas. Dean steps forward and puts a hand on Jack’s shoulder, flanking him. Mary steps in too, still holding the gun she’d had with her on patrol. None of them says anything.

They don’t need to.

* * *

Jack kills his father.

It’s a messy, ugly thing, but he does it for his family.

He does it for Sam, and he doesn’t even hesitate that much.

Dean might say that it means he’s grown up, but Sam knows better, knows that Jack has probably never felt younger than he does at that moment. He wants to get up and comfort Jack, but he’s bleeding, and his entire body hurts in a way that only happens when he’s been in a fight with angels—never much of a fight—so he stays where he is.

Cas heals him, and Dean helps him up, and then they join Jack next to the body.

It’s not technically Jack’s father’s body, just the body Jack’s father was wearing. For all Sam knows, Lucifer looked completely different to Jack than he did to Sam.

It’s not an appropriate time to ask.

Jack stares at the body for a long moment, and then he turns and walks away, back to his bedroom.

“Build a pyre,” Sam says.

Dean frowns and opens his mouth, but Sam glares until he shuts it again.

Cas and Dean leave.

Sam goes to Jack’s room, and the door swings open when he knocks.

Jack is sitting on the bed, his knees drawn up to his chin in a disarmingly childlike pose.

He’s trying to think of something to ask that isn’t as stupid as ‘are you okay?’, but Jack beats him to it.

“Were you okay?”

It takes Sam a minute to figure out what he means, but eventually he nods. “Mostly, yeah.”

He waits, but Jack doesn’t say anything, so he asks. “Are you?”

Jack shakes his head.

“Good.”

Jack tilts his head.

Sam offers a rueful smile. “Kinda fucked that I wasn’t upset when I shot my father.”

Jack shrugs a little listlessly and rests his head on his knees. “Is it… bad, that I didn’t want to kill him.”

“Why would that be bad?”

“He’s a bad guy,” He says, his intonation very much like Dean’s, as if this is an objective statement of fact.

“It’s not that simple,” Sam says. “Sometimes… sometimes the bad guy isn’t always bad. Sometimes he does good things.” One good thing. Sam will give Lucifer credit for one good thing, because he’d created Jack, and maybe that’s not enough to make Sam mourn him, but it does ease a lot of the bitter ache he feels when he thinks about things Lucifer has done.

Jack nods. “I don’t think…” He frowns, looking like he’s trying to find words in a language he hasn’t mastered, “I don’t think I’m sad that he’s dead. It’s…”

“You miss the idea?” Sam guesses. He knows what that’s like.

Jack shrugs. “I guess.”

“Jack?”

He takes another minute to dig around, the frown still fixed on his face. Finally, he says, “I wish he’d been good.”

Sam nods. “I know.”

“I didn’t want to kill him,” Jack says. “I wanted him to stop hurting you.”

Sam nods, and carefully reaches out, putting a hand on Jack’s shoulder and squeezing gently. “You did the right thing.”

Jack unfolds a little, leaning into Sam’s hand until Sam wraps an arm around his shoulders.

That night, they go outside, and Dean opens his lighter, but Jack puts his hand out, and the pyre catches fire, the flames engulfing it in less than a second.

Jack’s face is calm, peaceful, in the flickering light.

Cas and Dean stare impassively at the burning body, occasionally tossing glances over at Jack, though never at the same time.

Jack stays close to Sam, but he’s the first to turn away.

“Are you alright?” Cas asks him, gentle and concerned.

Jack nods.

Dean clears his throat, a sign that he’s about to try and be serious and parental. “It’s uh, okay if you aren’t. You killed your father, that’s… that has to be hard.”

Jack considers this, glances over his shoulder at the burning body, then he looks between each of them. “I killed my father,” He says. “Not my dad.”

Something clicks into place for Sam. It’s as true for him as it is for Jack, but he’d never managed to put the thought into words. He thinks of Bobby, his hand on Sam’s shoulder, telling him he’d done the right thing. He thinks of Dean, forgiving him in the dark car, and never once in more than ten years holding what he’d done against him. Perhaps the only case Sam can think of where Dean had done that.

He thinks if he looked his father in the eye tomorrow, he could say he forgave him and mean it. He also thinks he doesn’t have to. He could see his father on the street and keep on walking.

“Kid, you hungry?” Dean asks.

“Is it too late to make pie?” Jack asks.

Dean grips Jack’s shoulder. “Son, it’s never too late for pie.”

They all laugh, more out of relief than because it’s funny. The tension snaps. The weight is lifted. They surround Jack and herd him into the bunker, down to the kitchen.

Sam puts up halfhearted arguments—it’s really too late for the kid to be eating this much sugar—but he’s shut down, outvoted even by Cas.

It does help though, the bright light of the kitchen, Dean up to his elbows in butter and flour, making a mess and being loud because that’s how he cheers people up. Both Cas and Sam draw a line when Dean starts throwing flour, but even Sam is laughing when Cas gets a faceful.

The kitchen will be a mess, but Jack is smiling.

Too many hours later—it’s a good thing Jack doesn’t really _need_ sleep; he won’t be getting any tonight—they’re sitting around the kitchen table, chairs scooted a little too close together as they haplessly shove forks into the still-warm pie.

It’s not a hunter’s funeral, not the usual passing stories and drinks, because none of them have good stories to tell about Lucifer, but they swap other stories, and after a while they’re all laughing so hard pie keeps falling off their forks, splattering the table. For a second, Sam thinks they’re bloodstains, but he blinks and it’s cherries again.

He looks at Jack, and knows he saw it too.


End file.
